Monday, October 08, 2007

Look, insanity in print!

William Kristol thinks America should bomb Burma to help democracy there. In a column titled "Talk is Cheap", he ends with this little nugget:

In his second inaugural address, President Bush, quoting Lincoln, put "the rulers of outlaw regimes" on notice: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." Couldn't the Bush administration do more to give that just God a helping hand?

Um. Sure, if that's where you want to go. There's an old precedent for this kind of thinking, and it's variously translated as "Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius," or "Slay them all, God will know his own." Bush is Texan, so he might know it better as "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." Time and again we've seen that aerial bombing lacks the precision needed to separate the innocent from the guilty. Hell, the Catholic Church has been judging sinners a lot longer than GPS or laser-guided bombs, and they still protect the occasional pedophile.

I mean, what are we supposed to make of this man? Nobody treats him like the unmedicated mental patient he so clearly is -- quite the opposite, he's given space in the Washington Post to advocate bombing a nation of buddhists. And he continues to show absolutely no conception that the US military has limits. Limits, I hasten to add, made necessary by the various wars America is already in, and which he advocated for and continues to.